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Detroit Free Press Business Writer

The Texas doctor who wants to transform Detroit’s old Packard plant into a factory for modular homes and offices could deliver $6 million to Wayne County as early as Tuesday morning, according to her spokesman.

Dr. Jill Van Horn of Ennis, Texas, made a $6,038,000 offer Friday that capped a frenzied bidding war for the abandoned and decayed auto factory on Detroit’s east side.

In a statement released Monday, a spokesman for Van Horn said she and her team plan to turn the 35-acre site into a modern, export-oriented production facility for modular homes and offices. The statement said Van Horn is joined in the venture by unnamed “partners and investors from Detroit, Wall Street and international firms.”

“Modular homes and offices will be constructed on the site and shipped all over the world,” her spokesman, Davis Marshall, said in a statement Monday. “Building supplies will also be made here.”

David Szymanski, Wayne County’s chief deputy treasurer, said his office is scheduled to speak Tuesday morning with lawyers for Van Horn’s team of investors and partners regarding the money transfer.

Yet despite assurances by Van Horn’s representatives that her team has the money, it remains uncertain whether the doctor can produce the $6 million to back her bid.

Transforming the 40 mostly ruined buildings of the 35-acre Packard plant into a modern production facility would also entail a costly clean-up operation.

A family practice doctor, Van Horn appears to have little, if any, experience in real estate development. Monday’s announcement was the first explanation of her intentions for the Packard plant site.

Full payment would normally have been required Monday, but the county agreed to extend the deadline, Szymanski said.

If Van Horn doesn’t come through, the Packard plant would pass to the next-highest bidder in Friday’s auction. Szymanski declined to name the other bidders who jacked up the offer price from $601,000 in the online auction’s final hours.

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The second-place bid from an undisclosed bidder came in at $6,030,000, Szymanski said, although the county may opt to lower the price if Van Horn does not perform.

An experienced developer from Lima, Peru named Fernando Palazuelo has said he bowed out once bidding exceeded $2 million.

An earlier pre-auction deal in September for the Packard plant unraveled when Chicago-area developer Williams Hults failed to come up with $1 million cash needed to pay the site’s back taxes.

No one offered the Packard plant’s $1-million reserve price in the county’s first-round auction in September, hoping the property could be snagged on the cheap at this month’s final-round auction, when the bidding opened at a mere $21,000.

Monday’s statement said Van Horn’s plan would transform the Packard plant site “into a new economic center on the east side of Detroit,” creating as many as 6,000 jobs.

Van Horn did not disclose the total estimated price tag for the project or the precise type of modular structures that would be produced on the Packard site.

Her spokesman said he could not reveal the identities of team members until the auction deal is finalized.

“We don’t want to be like some of those other folks who come and say they’re going to buy, and this is what they’re going to do, and then it never happens,” Marshall said.

The project team is considering a variety of state and federal incentives and tax credit programs.

The new factory would likely not produce shipping container-type modulars that are popular in some niche markets, according to Marshall.

“These modular homes are houses that aren’t built on the site. It’s built in a factory, and transported to the site,” her spokesman said.

The project could involve refurbishing the rail lines outside the plant in order to transport the finished product for shipment from ports on the Detroit River.

“The trains will be delivering the products to the port, and they’ll be going out from the port,” he said.

Production faculties for modular homes are generally built close to their destination markets, according to two industry experts, as the plants themselves are inexpensive to build and transporting large modular components over big distances is pricey.

The closest cluster of modular home and office production sites and supplier companies is in Indiana.

Carl Hartman, co-owner of Oasis Homes, an Almont-based modular home builder, said demand for modular homes has picked up over the past few years since the housing crash.

“If they’re doing nicer stuff, there would definitely be a need for it,” Hartman said. “But the market is pretty well saturated for the low-end stuff.”